Wayve raises $1.5bn to take robotaxis global

Wayve, a London-based autonomous-driving software company, has raised about $1.5 billion in a Series D round that values it at $8.6 billion, according to Business Insider and the Evening Standard. The round includes $1.2 billion from investors such as Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber, alongside automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis, with additional Uber funding tied to deployments on Uber’s platform.

Wayve is selling a different story from the best-known robotaxi brands. It is not building its own fleet; it wants to license an “AI-first” driver to carmakers and fleet operators, a model CEO Alex Kendall argues avoids the capital burden of owning and maintaining vehicles. The pitch is that a general-purpose system—trained on broad driving data rather than city-specific rules and high-definition mapping—can be ported across different vehicle sensor setups and geographies faster than rivals that rely on bespoke mapping and tightly controlled operational design.

That business model pushes costs and liabilities outward. If Wayve’s software becomes the “autonomy layer” inside multiple manufacturers’ cars and multiple ride-hailing fleets, the expensive parts—vehicles, charging, maintenance, depot space, and local compliance—sit with partners, while Wayve keeps the high-margin software revenue. Uber’s involvement also signals where the market may be headed: not a free-for-all of many small robotaxi operators, but a few dispatch platforms integrating a small number of certified autonomy stacks.

London is the immediate test bed, but it is also a preview of how self-driving could become a regulated utility. Trials require permissions, safety cases, and rules about remote supervision, incident reporting, and insurance. When something goes wrong, the bill is rarely confined to the company that wrote the code: emergency response, road closures, investigations, and knock-on congestion costs are socialised, while insurance pools spread payouts across millions of policyholders.

Wayve’s investors are implicitly betting that regulation will not just allow robotaxis, but will standardise them—creating a compliance moat. A software stack that is “approved” in one jurisdiction can become the default choice for fleets that cannot afford repeated certification cycles, and for automakers that want a single system to sell across markets.

Wayve says its test fleet has driven in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America and Japan, and it plans supervised autonomy in consumer vehicles from 2027. Its first commercial robotaxi trials in London will run on someone else’s balance sheet.